Ayad Akhtar is a novelist and playwright. His work has been published and performed in 24+ languages. He is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for Fiction, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Akhtar is the author of Homeland Elegies (Little, Brown & Co.), which The Washington Post called “a tour de force” and The New York Times called “a beautiful novel…that had echoes of The Great Gatsby and that circles, with pointed intellect, the possibilities and limitations of American life.” His first novel, American Dervish (Little, Brown & Co.), was published in over 20 languages. As a playwright, he has written Junk (Lincoln Center, Broadway; Kennedy Prize for American Drama, Tony nomination); Disgraced (Lincoln Center, Broadway; Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Tony nomination); The Who & The What (Lincoln Center); and The Invisible Hand (NYTW; Obie Award, Outer Critics Circle John Gassner Award, Olivier, and Evening Standard nominations).

Carrie R. Moore’s fiction and essays have appeared in One Story, New England Review, The Sewanee Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, For Harriet, EPOCH, The Southern Review, and other publications. She has received scholarships and fellowships from the Community of Writers, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies. She earned her MFA in Fiction at the Michener Center for Writers, where she won the Keene Prize for Literature and served as Fiction Editor of Bat City Review. Moore was longlisted for the 2026 PEN/Faulkner Award for her short-story collection Make Your Way Home. She worked on drafts for some of the stories in the collection while at Steinbeck House.

Hernan Diaz is the Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of two novels published in thirty-seven languages. He is the recipient of the John Updike award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, given to “a writer whose contributions to American literature have demonstrated consistent excellence.”

His stories and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Granta, The Yale Review, Playboy, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, among others.

Eileen Sungyoo Chong is a writer from Chicagoland. Previously an event photographer, she received an MFA from The Michener Center for Writers at UT Austin and a BA from the University of Notre Dame. She is the recipient of a Kundiman Fellowship and a 202Creates residency. During her stay at the Steinbeck House, she will be working on a novel.

Noah Hawley is one of the most accomplished auteurs and versatile storytellers working in television, film and literature today. Hawley balances the art of telling cinematic, unforgettable character-driven stories that linger long after you’ve been immersed in them. Over the course of his more than 20-year career, Hawley’s work as a novelist, screenwriter, series creator, showrunner and director has garnered acclaim – winning an Emmy®, Writers Guild, PEN, Critics’ Choice, and Peabody Awards – and passionate response from audiences.

Ryan Paradiso is a writer and publisher (as NECK) whose poems have appeared in Matthew Genitempo’s photobook Jasper, Michael A. Muller’s album Lower River, Peripheries, Meridian, and The Academy of American Poets, among other places. He received an MFA from The Michener Center for Writers.